Re: SQL encryption - how to do in-place encryption

[Tim Bronski <tim.bronski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just to be picky...in crypto terms "plaintext" defines the raw 
unencrypted data and has nothing to do with it being "text". The output 
of an encryption process might base64 encode the result if there's any 
chance the data might be accidentally modified but that's got nothing to 
do with the encryption per se. All modern algorithms work with binary 
data in bits or blocks of bits. Encrypted data is longer than the 
plaintext for block algorithms because they always work with a set 
number of bits - the block size - and pad out shorter data. Stream 
ciphers like RC4 (and AES in streaming mode) will produce a cipher text 
of the same size as the plaintext but of course it's binary data, and 
anyway, streaming ciphers are not suitable for database columns. Another 
reason that the encrypted output is longer than the input data is that 
there's often more information that needs to be stored with the 
encrypted result - some random data (a salt or an iv) and perhaps a key 
identifier.

Tim

On 5/2/2012 11:10 PM, CRPence wrote:
>   But that would introduce a new problem,
> because most encryption is designed to encrypt/plaintext/  data, so the
> binary data would first need to be passed through a base64 encoding to
> enable proper encryption.